Does the streetcar have to stop for pedestrians?: Editorial Sketchbook

An eastbound streetcar crosses an uninhabited crosswalk on Southwest Harrison Street in Portland March 18.

(Erik Lukens/Staff)

Just west of Naito Parkway on Southwest Harrison Street, there's a spot at which almost all of Portland's various forms of transportation mingle. Here, between Pettygrove Park and Lovejoy Fountain Park, the busy Southwest Pedestrian Trail crosses Harrison midblock on a broad and brightly painted crosswalk. There's a bus stop on either side of the road and a Portland Streetcar track on either side of the central island, which separates Harrison's two westbound lanes from its two eastbound lanes. Cyclists brave the traffic and treacherous streetcar tracks en route to the South Waterfront.

I've caught the bus during evening rush hour at this location since July. My daily routine involves one trip across the street, followed by several minutes of thumb-twiddling and crosswalk observation until the bus arrives. By and large, everything seems to flow without incident or adrenaline.

The cyclist vs. motorist war I keep hearing about may be happening elsewhere in Portland, but I haven't seen that here. Cars and trucks usually give cyclists enough space, and cyclists tend to ride predictably and responsibly. I haven't even seen one get caught in a streetcar track.

Give Portland motorists a big, brightly painted crosswalk, meanwhile, and many of them seem to look for reasons to yield. See a guy with a dog 20 feet from the street? Stop. See someone loitering on the sidewalk who might be thinking about crossing the street? Stop. It's almost as if they felt guilty.

Yes, there are jerks, and, yes, there are people who blow through an inhabited crosswalk because they're looking at their phones. But for every one of these, there's a driver who stops two car lengths from the crosswalk lest the shadow of his Prius deprive a pedestrian of sunlight. As a pedestrian, I appreciate that.

And then there's the streetcar, whose operators are routinely less observant of marked crosswalks than almost anyone else.

Take Tuesday at 12:45 p.m., for instance. I walked to Harrison with camera phone at the ready, and the very first streetcar to pass performed exactly as expected. I stood at the end of the crosswalk with a clear intent to use it and stepped into the street as the streetcar approached. It cruised right on by (please see video).

Later that afternoon, a streetcar did stop at the same crosswalk. Of course, that was hours after I'd called TriMet, Portland Streetcar Inc. and the Portland Bureau of Transportation - the three partners in streetcar operations - to let them know what I was up to and ask a question I'd been meaning to ask for a long time: Do streetcars, like cars, trucks and TriMet buses, have to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks?

Surprisingly, given the straightforward nature of the question, responses were mixed. TriMet, which supplies a chunk of streetcar funding and whose employees operate the vehicles, pointed me to Portland Streetcar, which provides administrative support. PSI's representatives said that streetcar operators do, in fact, have to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks as operators of other vehicles do.

What about the Portland Bureau of Transportation, which is responsible for operations and maintenance? On Wednesday, streetcar manager Kathryn Levine and PBOT spokeswoman Diane Dulken simply refused to answer the question - which I repeated several times - citing "ambiguity in the law." They didn't elaborate on what that ambiguity might be. In any case, the Portland Police Bureau says that streetcars are, in fact, obligated to yield to pedestrians. You know, just like buses, whose function they replicate with the help of a lot of capital investment.

The law is one thing and physics another, however, and I have no trouble believing streetcar supervisor Aaron Cowell when he says streetcars take a long time to stop. For that reason, he says, operators are trained to scan the horizon and ring a bell if pedestrians start to get frisky - my word, not his. But don't expect them to stop at crosswalks.

The streetcar is attractive, more fun to ride than a bus and undoubtedly a better urban marketing tool. But if you were to list the ways in which the bus serves Portlanders more sensibly than its hipper electric cousin, you'd be remiss not to note that the operating rules at least are clear and everyone - including drivers and pedestrians - knows what they are. Then again, buses don't go "ding, ding."